Aceable Innovation & Technology Culture

How does innovation show up in your company culture?

At Aceable, we constantly ask ourselves, “What’s just now possible?” which helps us move fast and quickly jump on opportunities that were maybe out of reach months if not weeks ago. We don’t fall in love with solutions because we know those might change along the way. Instead, we have clarity on the pain points we need to solve and the outcomes we need to reach. We also know that asking ourselves, “What’s now possible?” only once is not enough. We understand that innovation is not an endpoint; it’s a practice. And leadership does an excellent job of modeling the level and pace of innovation they expect. It really starts with them. They’re willing to roll up their sleeves and adopt new tech and new approaches right along with the rest of the company.

What’s one recent innovation that improved user or employee experience?

Our regulatory team receives a lot of communications from many different sources — state agencies, internal teams and partners — some related to courses already in the market and some related to courses we’re actively building and in the process of getting approved. Managing the information flow is a challenge and pretty time-consuming with different threads across tools and different teams that need to be notified. We wanted to tackle this problem, and as a first step, we built a “sorting hat” email agent that lets our regulatory lead forward critical “build in progress” information, and the system automatically classifies it into the right category and pushes it to our source of truth documentation that everyone in the company can leverage. It’s a first version, but it’s a step towards reducing the friction of information flow overhead to zero. The broader vision is expanding this approach so that it covers course maintenance as well. 

How do you balance experimentation with stability?

It’s an interesting challenge. There’s a lot of experimentation happening, and that raises some tactical — but super critical — questions: What’s the value of training? What does documentation look like in this world? How do we build a roadmap around our innovation efforts? I don’t claim to have all the answers, but we’ve adapted our communication cadence and rituals to account for constant improvement. Instead of one training a month, we do a small training twice a week. Instead of a deck, we demo live and record on Loom so anyone can catch up. We automate updates on Slack. We make things visual and keep a working Figjam. We go out of our way to bring people along because we know we’re moving fast. And communication alone isn’t enough; you need clear objectives and key results to stay accountable for the business value you’re trying to drive. 

Experimentation for the sake of experimentation isn’t what we want. If you’re driving a ton of experimentation but the results aren’t moving the needle on your OKRs, that’s a good opportunity to stop and re-evaluate: Does your team need more stability? Do you need to just let the team work on a current workflow instead of changing a process yet again? Too much experimentation isn’t an issue necessarily, but challenges show up when it’s rolled out at a pace where the team or the user can’t capture the benefits. The OKRs are one signal. Talking to your stakeholders is another. Both tell you whether you’re on the right track, and it comes down to doing the work right alongside them.